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Email offer test

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Email Offer TestFree shipping or fifty percent off? Free gift with purchase or deferred billing? What kind of email offerwill get you not only the best user response but also the best return-on-investment and repeat users? Inthis article, well discuss email offer tests and promotion tests in your email marketing campaign.Why Use Email Offer Test?Subject lines and content may drive your email marketing metrics such as open rates and click throughrates, but your email offer or promotion drives the actual financial success of your campaign. If nobodycares about your offer, if its not competitive enough, if its not easy enough to understand, or if its nota product that anybody cares about, then you wont make any money. You can have a one hundredpercent open rate, but a zero percent purchase rate if you promote the wrong email offer. Additionally,the difference between a "good" email offer and a "great" email offer can be the difference between astatus quo email performance and a real winner. How will you ever know what kind of email offer getyou the best return if you dont test?Types of Email Offer TestsThe email offers and promotions that you want to test may vary extensively based on your product andmarket segment. However, some common tests to run are included below.  Types of Email Offers: The most obvious test that youll want to run is an email offer type test. While this may vary, as noted above, based on your market segment, common email offer types include: shipping offers, bonus gifts, discounts, free upgrades, and extra loyalty points if you run a loyalty program. Youll want to consider testing all of those as well as any types of offers or promotions that are specific to your line of business.  Percent versus Dollar Amount: If youre going to be offering discounts, youll want to test whether your users are more motivated by seeing their discount presented as a dollar amount or as a percentage amount. Most case studies imply that a percentage amount will convert better, but that may not be true for your demographic.  Discount Amount: Youll also, obviously, want to test different discount amounts to find out where you get the best return on investment. This may, as noted in the tips below, vary by user segments on your list.  Free Shipping versus Shipping Upgrade: Free shipping has been shown to be one of the most effective ecommerce promotions available on the internet. However, sometimes you can get just as much value from offering a shipping upgrade from standard shipping to an expedited form of shipping. Test free shipping versus shipping upgrades and see if you can 1

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improve your profit margin with an upgrade email offer instead of an entirely free shipping offer.  Minimum Purchase Amount: For many promotions, youll require users to make a minimum purchase amount. After you do the math of what you can afford in terms of how low that minimum purchase amount needs to be, test making it higher. You may get the same response to the email offer whether you require people to spend twenty dollars or fifty dollars. If thats the case, you should always make the minimum fifty dollars!  Seasonal Email Offers: Youll obviously want to develop and test seasonal email offers as well. Do your respondents buy more when its promoted near a holiday or vacation time? Test email offers that are seasonally themed. Then you can decide in the future if its worth putting seasonal campaigns together at all.  Time Sensitive Email Offers: Finally, test whether your users respond better to time sensitive email offers that need to act on immediately or longer-tail offers. There are many arguments that time sensitivity causes users to take quick action, but as people spend less time in their inbox, that may not be as true. Be sure to test it to find out whats right for you.Best Practices for Email Offer TestsIn addition to testing your email offers for bottom line revenue and profit margin promotion, considerthe viral and acquisition value of an email offer. Did an email offer get you a lot of shared attention onthe internet or did it get you many new customers? That may be worth it even if it didnt generate asmuch up front revenue as you were hoping for.Dont lose money! Particularly in the era of social shopping and huge discounts, its often considerednecessary to offer massive promotions to generate customer interest. However, the math on that oftendoesnt add up and you end up losing money. A less well-responded to email offer that makes a profitmay be better than a popular email offer that loses money for you.Remember that there may be segments of your database that respond to one type of email offer betterthan to another type. Email offers may not be "one size fits all", and you may want to test differentemail offers to different portions of your database.Consider that timing plays a role in email offer success as well. You may want to run an email offer testseveral times in case youve inadvertently sent an offer at a time when a product was unpopular orpeople were generally not spending as much money as usual.No matter what email marketing strategy you are taking, the first step to ensure a successful emailcampaign is to choose a reliable email sending partner. Comm100, who provides this comprehensiveemail marketing ebook, offers you powerful Email Marketing Software, which is both a great long-term 2

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and short-term solution to improving your email marketing program to a new level. For moreinformation please visit : http://emailmarketing.comm100.com/ 3